Obamanation …¶
… isn’t an insulting name for Obama, or even for what he has ‘wrought’. It’s a name for America, and thus for the leading spirit (or Zeitgeist) of the world. A country where support for a Harvard Law presidency ‘bottoms out’ (repeatedly) at something above 40% knows what it wants — and is getting it (good and hard). Blaming Obama for any of this is like blaming pustules for the bubonic plague.
The world deserves Obama almost as much as America does, and in many cases, even more. If the Cathedral is basically to be applauded — and who doesn’t believe that? — there’s every reason to mainline it, by putting the authentic voice of the academy in power. As the chrysalis-husk of a universal project, America is duty bound to abolish itself as a particular nation. If it defers to its own ‘propositional’ ideals, how could it not? There are even chunks of the Tea Party who kinda sorta felt it was the right thing to do. The conservative establishment certainly did, including the Republican campaign machines of the two last presidential elections. The Idea necessitates blood sacrifice, which Obamanation consummates.
However neoreaction makes sense of itself, it signals what it is through a dismissal of partisan vulgarity. Anybody who thinks the GoP has the key even to the outhouse is decidedly not ‘one of us’. Like the tingle-crotched devotees of the One, we understand that Obama is a destiny, and even an incarnation of logos. What he symbolizes has been awaited for a long time. His personal vacuity and administrative incompetence do not detract, in the slightest, from that. Through the fantasy that he reduces to (with only insignificant remainder), the Cathedral announces itself purely at last. Attitudinal correctness is the only authority to be recognized in the end.
By voiding governance from its summit, ‘Obama’ makes the neoreactionary case. He shows that government is to be found elsewhere, in the machinery of practical elitism, and that — there too — symbolic gestures have almost entirely supplanted functional competence. Government, even real government, is no longer expected to work. All that is required is that it can be morally legitimated, down to its most minute corpuscle, so that its failures are clearly seen — which is to say promoted — as the fault of something other than itself.
Insofar as retrograde pieces of America insist upon being themselves, as if untouched by the Idea, they are betrayed (by the ‘media’) as unworthy of their government, and justly suffering for their sins. Carnal privilege blinds them to what they should joyfully give up. To not believe in government — as the radiant sign of the collective — is a fallen state, from which the Obamanation extends a promise of redemption. By losing everything, with the help of government, one enters into the Kingdom.
The Obamanation is not what Obama has done (an intrinsically ridiculous construction). It’s what chose Obama, as its symbol. It is the virtual evacuation of the world into America, and the complementary evacuation of specifically American power from the world. This is the phase of historical progression in which neoreaction necessarily emerges, its diagnoses dramatized by everything that now occurs, undisguised.
For that we are truly grateful, intrinsically, which is to say, in our very existence as the channel for something else. Conservatives will continue to find that hard to understand.
Consider this Instapundit visual joke, just for a moment:
The ‘Bush’ angle sounds partisan, and thus embarrassingly knuckle-draggy to brandy-sipping sophisticates of the Outer right, but that judgment might be over-hasty. Perhaps partisanship itself is swallowed up into the lampoon. In any case, it still makes me laugh, due mostly to the tacit understanding that “World War III” is what Obama is for.
Of course, when you elect the pure totem of the Cathedral to the world’s highest office, you’re really — or consequentially — calling for the cleansing of the earth in the fires of hell. It requires only the most elementary comprehension of Occidental religious history to understand that.
Spiritual purity, and damn the consequences, that’s the Obamanation (and, by the way, you’re a racist). It’s the bloody ruination of world order in the name of moral fanaticism, eclipsing all strategic realism through its wishful thinking and associated, narrow political maneuvers, before blundering into the present stage of terminal, incendiary, paralysis.
Who could have imagined that the world going to shit would be so bizarrely entertaining?
ADDED: Breaking point?